A History of the Middle East (54 page)

The huge increase in Iran’s oil revenues in 1973–4 drove the shah’s ambitions to the border of megalomania. He began to proclaim that his country would be among the six most advanced industrial countries of the world by the end of the century. In fact – in spite of the real industrial progress, the extension of education and literacy, and the growth of the professional and business class – many of the standards of Iranian society remained those of the Third World. With hindsight it is possible to discern that the sudden vast increase in government revenues was the nemesis of the regime. The huge growth in spending which followed placed intolerable strains on the country’s social and economic fabric. When overspending led to retrenchment and recession combined with continuing inflation, even the members of the new middle class who had benefited most from the shah’s policies became disaffected, while the mass of the population tended to see the hasty westernization and un-Islamic modernization of the country as the source of all evil.

The shah, in common with most Western observers (including ambassadors), still underrated the opposition. He saw only an opportunistic alliance between the extreme left and the mullahs, and referred contemptuously to ‘Islamic Marxists’. In fact it was the mullahs who were best able to articulate the discontent of the majority.

As the tide of unrest gathered momentum, it became apparent that popular opposition was massive and deep-seated. The huge coalition of discontent found its voice in Ayatollah Khomeini. After being ousted from his Iraqi exile by an embarrassed Iraqi government (which wanted stable relations with Iran), he took refuge in Paris, from where he issued uncompromising demands for the shah’s abdication. As strikes and demonstrations spread, the shah attempted a series of measures, mixing concessions with firmness, in an effort to secure his power. But these were ineffective. The armed forces remained apparently loyal, but the shah had finally lost the will and
determination to hold on to power through the massive repression which would have been necessary – his arrogant demeanour had always concealed a certain lack of decision. He was also suffering from the cancer which was to kill him two years later. Without the will to retain his throne, neither his loyal followers nor his US allies could help him. On 16 January 1979 he left Iran with his queen, ostensibly on holiday but never to return. His departure from Tehran was cheered by two million supporters of Ayatollah Khomeini. Twenty-five centuries of the Persian monarchy had ended.

Two weeks later the frail 76-year-old ayatollah showed that he could inspire millions of his people to frenzied enthusiasm when he returned in triumph to declare that, with his Islamic Revolution, a truly Islamic republic would be established.

This momentous event was soon to be compared in importance with the French Revolution of 1789 and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. For the comparison to be sustained it was necessary for the Iranian Revolution’s influence to spread far beyond Iran’s borders, and especially to the Muslim peoples of the Middle East. Khomeini and his clerical associates left no doubt that this was their intention. They proclaimed that all the regimes of Muslim countries in the region were corrupt, unworthy and un-Islamic and therefore deserved to be overthrown. They also denounced these regimes’ association with the West. Khomeini declared that a true Muslim country should have no truck with either East or West, but his special hatred was directed towards the United States – ‘the Great Satan’, the former ally of the shah. Anti-American rage swept Iran and, when President Carter allowed the shah to travel from his retreat in the Bahamas to the United States for medical treatment, a crowd of militants stormed the US embassy in Tehran, seizing some fifty US hostages and all the embassy documents. This outrage against all the norms of diplomacy, which even the most radical and revolutionary regimes usually accepted, provoked the United States, with the support of its allies, to declare Iran an international outlaw. Khomeini was not displeased. His uncompromising defiance of the
West provoked admiration among all the Muslim masses to whom he wished to appeal. This was reinforced by his adoption of the cause of Palestine. He reversed the shah’s
de facto
alliance with Israel and invited Arafat to Tehran, where he was greeted as a hero.

At home, Ayatollah Khomeini set about consolidating clerical rule under his leadership. His authoritarianism provoked the opposition of the secular nationalist and left-wing elements who had supported his revolution, but they were no match for the hold he had gained over the Iranian people. In fact the most serious opposition to his rule came from more senior Islamic clerics who challenged his religious authority. But even this he was able to contain. He had political genius, which they lacked. He based his rule on the doctrine of
velayat-e faqih
– that is, ‘government of the Islamic jurist’ – which he had expounded in lectures in exile. This holds that the true Islamic state must be based on the Koran and be modelled after the Prophet’s Islamic community in the seventh century, and that it should be administered by the clerical class as the Prophet’s heirs. As the self-appointed governing Islamic jurist, Khomeini was able to hold supreme power above that of the president, prime minister and elected parliament, which were all provided for in the new Islamic constitution. Under his authority, mass trials of the shah’s former supporters were organized, leading to many executions. The educational system was purged of non-Islamic influences. Squads of young Muslim militiamen enforced a strict Islamic code of conduct. Educated Iranian women, who had reached an advanced stage of emancipation before the revolution, had their role in public life sharply reduced and all had to envelop their heads and bodies in Islamic dress in public,

The success of the Khomeini Revolution and its declared desire to export itself caused serious alarm among Iran’s Arab neighbours, but nowhere more than in Iraq. With its secular pan-Arabist ideology and its large Shiite population with little share in political power, Iraq was a vulnerable target. Tehran Arabic broadcasts poured hatred and contempt on the Iraq regime and called on the Iraqi people to overthrow it.

Iraq’s president, Saddam Hussein, decided to act first. Although Iran has immense resources and three times Iraq’s population, he believed that the Khomeini Revolution could be overthrown by a swift blow. The Iranian regular armed forces were demoralized. Iran’s large minorities – the Kurds in the north-west, the Turkomans of the Caspian plain and the Arabs of Khuzestan in the south-west – saw their religious and cultural identities threatened by the Shiite fundamentalist policies of the Revolution and were demanding autonomy and threatening revolt. The economy, facing a Western boycott, was in dire condition. Almost certainly, exiled royalist Iranian officers helped to convince President Saddam that it was time to move. On 17 September 1980 Iraq, alleging various minor acts of Iranian aggression, denounced the 1975 agreement with the former shah and invaded Iran.

The eight-year war which ensued was on an epic scale, with colossal casualties, massive material destruction and mutual rocket attacks on Baghdad and Tehran in ‘the war of the cities’. Iraq initially advanced deep into Iranian territory, but its invasion soon proved the danger of attacking a revolution. Iranian morale was higher than expected, and the Arab Iranians of the south-west did not rise to support the invaders. Within a year Iraq had been forced back, and by May 1982 Iran had recaptured nearly all its territory. All Iraq’s outlets to the sea were cut off. A prolonged stalemate ensued, interspersed by large-scale offensives which, as in the First World War, left many dead but the battle lines scarcely changed. Iraq, which could obtain arms from both East and West, had the advantage in weapons – especially tanks and artillery. Iran, lacking fresh supplies of its American weapons, was forced to turn to sources such as North Korea or the international black market in arms. It used its numerical superiority to launch human-wave assaults which often involved thousands of teenage youths imbued with the characteristically Shiite readiness for martyrdom.

For some time the Gulf War directly involved only Iraq and Iran. Initial world alarm caused a further steep rise in oil prices, but the reaction of the world outside the Middle East could be summed up
in a possibly apocryphal comment ascribed to Dr Henry Kissinger: that the best result would be for both sides to lose the war. The war was prolonged because, while Iraq was prepared to settle for a return to the old frontiers, Iran demanded nothing less than the downfall of Saddam Hussein.

The six Arab Gulf states – Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Oman – supported Iraq with varying degrees of enthusiasm and openness, and as the war progressed they helped to sustain Iraq with money and supplies. They were appalled at the prospect of an outright Iranian victory. The threatening situation, aggravated by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, acted as a catalyst for them to join together in self-defence in May 1981 to establish the Gulf Co-operation Council. This looked forward to a staged process of political and economic fusion, somewhat along the lines of the European Community.

Among the other Arab states, Jordan and Egypt declared their support for Iraq in the war even more openly. Jordan’s Aqaba port became the principal route for Iraqi imports of war materials; Egypt supplied arms and ammunition. But President Assad of Syria declared himself Iran’s ally in the war and closed Iraq’s oil pipeline across Syrian territory. Although this bizarre friendship between a professed Arab nationalist and an Iranian Shiite fundamentalist might have had something to do with the fact that Assad came from Syria’s sub-Shia Alawite minority, from his view it was primarily a strategic alliance against the detested rival Baathist regime in Iraq. Syria benefited from the supply of a regular quota of free Iranian oil and from the pro-Iranian sympathies among the Shiites of Lebanon. President Assad rejected all the repeated attempts by other Arab states to persuade him to change sides. The ideological cynicism of the Syrian–Iranian alliance was underlined when, in February 1982, the Syrian army ruthlessly repressed an armed rising in the city of Hama by the Muslim Brotherhood, whose aims were closely similar to those of Iran’s Islamic Revolution.

While the fears of the Revolution among most Arab regimes were real enough, the danger that it could reach out to topple them
receded as the war progressed – even when Iran appeared to have the advantage. Khomeini emphatically wished to appeal to all Muslims, not only to the Shiite minority, and he scorned any concept of nationalism within the Islamic
umma
. But he could not prevent the war from widening the ancient Persian–Arab rivalry or the Sunni–Shiite division. In the Arab Gulf states, any initial popular enthusiasm for the Islamic Revolution was soon confined to the Shiite minorities. This caused their Sunni rulers serious concern, but increased their determination to stand firm, and the bloodthirsty repression of all opposition in Iran also helped to antagonize their Sunni subjects. In Iraq, with its Shiite majority, territorial nationalism showed itself to be the stronger force. Just as the Arab-speaking Iranians had refused to side with Iraq, the great majority of Iraq Shiite Arabs remained loyal and showed no eagerness to be occupied and ruled by the Islamic Republic. It was Iraq’s Sunni Kurds who gave the regime serious trouble.

In countries more remote from the Gulf War – in Egypt, Sudan and the Maghreb states – the Khomeini Revolution’s defiance of both West and East retained it some prestige among Muslim militants who had no love for the Iraqi regime. But the Ayatollah’s influence was symbolic. There was no question of accepting his political leadership – the Muslim Brothers of Egypt and Sudan had begun their own struggle long before the Iranian Revolution.

The murderous stalemate in the Gulf War continued from 1982 to 1987. ‘The war of the cities’, with rockets and shelling, was pursued sporadically at heavy cost. The Iranians alternated human-wave assaults with attacks on a smaller scale at varied points along the frontier to wear down Iraqi morale, but this was higher now that Iraqi troops were defending their own territory. In 1986 the Iranians captured Iraq’s Faw peninsula on the Gulf coast but failed at heavy cost in an attempt to seize Basra. The focus of the war moved to the waters of the Gulf, where Iraq’s air superiority could be used against Iran’s vital oil exports but Iran’s naval superiority enabled it to blockade Iraqi supplies. The danger that the tanker war might intensify and spread at last attracted the serious attention
of the superpowers. In 1987 the United States offered to reflag Kuwaiti tankers to provide protection (following a similar offer by the Soviet Union), and by mid-year the USA was in full-scale naval confrontation with Iran. On 20 July the UN Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 598 calling for an immediate end to all hostilities. Iraq accepted this but Iran refused, on the grounds that at the very least President Saddam’s responsibility for the war should be internationally accepted.

In 1988 the war took a new and final turn. Between May and June the Iraqis recaptured Faw and drove the Iranians out of other key areas on the frontier. With the numbers of willing Iranian martyrs declining and economic collapse looming, the closest supporters of the infirm octogenarian Khomeini persuaded him that there was no alternative to accepting the UN cease-fire. He told his people that taking the decision ‘was more deadly than taking poison’.

The cease-fire held, with the help of the UN observers, but it was still only an armed truce. UN-sponsored peace talks failed to achieve a peace agreement to settle the outstanding border disputes, or even an exchange of prisoners. The two regimes remained deadly enemies, although they had to accept that renewed war was impossible for some years. They began to rearm even as they set about reconstructing their ruined economies.

A triumphant President Hussein declared that Iraq had won the war – which in a sense it had, even if he had not achieved his original war aims of overthrowing the Islamic Republic. He had won by not losing, just as Khomeini had lost by not winning.